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A Win Against Pain

Updated: Feb 2



Pain. It’s something we all feel but that’s about the only similarity from person-to-person because pain is complicated. There are many processes in the body involved and how it is perceived is subjective.


Vertex, a pharmaceutical company I once worked for, figured out by studying a genetic mutation that allows a group of people in Pakistan to be able to walk on hot coals where they feel the heat but don’t perceive it as painful was the key. And it was about blocking the signal from the site of the pain to the brain thus blocking the perception of pain. It’s super cool but very complicated to develop. There are lots of sodium channels, which is what you have to target and being selective and effective without any other major side effects isn’t simple. On top of that, when you’re dealing with something that’s subjective and very susceptible to the placebo effect, proving it works in good studies is nearly impossible. But somehow Vertex did it.


There’s something special at Vertex for sure. I stayed there for 11 years and worked at multiple sites and there’s a reason why I’ve seen several of my colleagues celebrate 25+ year anniversaries recently. Many people will not have heard about Vertex before this drug for pain was approved because a lot of their success comes from their drugs for Cystic Fibrosis, which is a serious and devastating disease, but it affects a relatively small population. With a drug for pain, people are going to know about Vertex.


During the time I worked at Vertex, I worked my tail off. I sacrificed a lot but I felt passionately that we were going to make people’s lives better with our medicines and that made it worth it. Working in Compound Management, we were the first step in the process and if we made a mistake, it could have prevented a drug from getting to patients and my attention to detail was fine tuned from that experience. We also developed these badass integrated automated systems and created the software that controlled them. My team pushed boundaries and I have a lot of pride in the tools we developed that helped research progress. Everyone loves it when their literal blood, sweat and tears were all for something, right??


Now it’s time for me to address the elephant in the room (or in the cyberspace you are reading this) and that is that I now work in cannabis and advocate for cannabis medicine and using it for the treatment of pain. That hasn’t changed at all and it’s still very important when using any medicine to weigh many factors. This new pill is not perfect and it’s not going to be for everyone. But to have it as an option when we haven’t had a new pain drug in over 20 years and opioids are still so heavily used, it’s a win. It’s a win against pain and opioid addiction. Because the drug doesn’t work in the brain, you don’t get high and it shouldn’t be addictive.


One other thing I want to comment on is pricing. There’s going to be a lot of talk about the price of the drug and why it’s too much. Pricing is so hard but when it takes over 20 years to bring a drug to patients, you have to pay for that somehow. And honestly our healthcare system is just broken. Pharmaceutical companies do end up with too much money, which gives them too much power but insurance companies play a big role in what we actually pay for medicine (well not for cannabis because insurance doesn’t cover it…but that’s another story). It’s going to be expensive and that sucks but with the drug Vertex developed for Cystic Fibrosis, if a patient couldn’t pay for the drug, Vertex found a way to get it to them anyway.


I want to finish by saying how much gratitude I have to all the people at Vertex, past and present, that have contributed to getting this drug to patients. It’s a big deal and I’m a little sad I’m not still there with them but I’m just over here now, fighting a different fight. And I am incredibly grateful for all I learned while working in pharmaceuticals that I could bring over to cannabis to help grow this industry that is so special and important and also a really big deal.



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